POP/JAZZ;Queen of the Comeback, Cher Tries Yet Again

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WHEN ASKED WHAT IS THE MEANEST thing anyone has ever written about her, Cher remembers having read once that if the world were destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, the only things left alive would be "cockroaches and Cher."

Exactly who imagined this postnuclear landscape and in what publication it ran, she can't recall. But in its mixture of loathing and admiration for Cher's survival skills, this picture of the raven-haired star rising up among a trillion insects distills the ambivalent public attitude toward a woman who has enjoyed more show business comebacks than Judy Garland and Bette Midler put together.

Cher is the proverbial cat with nine lives," says her friend David Geffen, the entertainment mogul whom she almost married in the 1970's. "She's really a very delicate piece of machinery. People think she's tough, but the truth is she's a pussycat who has had to feign toughness in order to keep from being killed."

After lying low for several years, nearly flattened by a severe case of chronic fatigue syndrome complicated by pneumonia and an embarrassing interlude as an infomercial queen, Cher is again on the comeback trail. Her late-blooming movie career, which began in 1982 with "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" and peaked in 1987 with "Moonstruck" (for which she won an Oscar for best actress), has been shakily revived with "Faithful," her first film since "Mermaids" in 1990. This dark marital comedy, in which she stars with Ryan O'Neal and Chazz Palminteri, died at the box office two weeks after it opened last April. "It was no loss," she allowed. "At least the reviews said it was nice to see me acting again."

Musically, she seems to be faring better. "It's a Man's World," her first pop album in five years, has got off to a promising start with the help of a hit single, "One by One." From an artistic standpoint, this soulful collection of grown-up pop songs, a version of which was released in England last November, is the high point of her recording career. Capped by an iconoclastic rendition of "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World," James Brown's ode to male supremacy, the album evokes the hard emotional lessons learned by a woman who has loved too well but not wisely.

Cher's sorrowful vocals convey the same tone of bruised but unbowed self-appraisal that gave Tina Turner's 1984 comeback album, "Private Dancer," an autobiographical tinge. Released by Reprise Records in America last week, barely a month after her 50th birthday, the album suggests that Cher, who has been saddled with a tabloid image of a boy-crazy perpetual adolescent, has achieved a kind of emotional maturity.

Turning 50 was not as bad as she had feared. "I thought it was going to be awful," she said the other day, ensconced in a Manhattan hotel suite. "But it was a day just like any other day, and I was having a really good time." Lithe and statuesque in a black jump suit, she paused to wash down one pill from a fistful of capsules she identified as vitamin E, vitamin C, magnesium and evening primrose oil with a swig from a bottle of mineral water. The room was pungent with the scent of burning incense.

With a face as smooth and translucent as white marble framed by plumes of jet-black hair that set off her jutting cheekbones, Cher exuded the aura of an image-conscious teen-age rebel whose persona is an eclectic accumulation of styles: basic beatnik black, hippie nonchalance and fashion-model hauteur toughened with biker-chick bravado. Her casual use of profanity suggested the defiant misfit who continually ran away from home as a child.

Her love affair with rock-and-roll began 40 years ago when her mother took her to an Elvis Presley concert at which he appeared in his famous gold suit. "For me, Elvis was a singing James Dean, and I was really rebellious," said Cher. "When I was growing up in Southern California, the role models were Sandra Dee and Doris Day, and everyone but me was cute and perky and blond. I was dark and moody and strange looking."

By her own count, Cher has been in show business for 33 years. During that time, her public image has teetered between being a joke (the 1970's, when she had hits with kitschy exotica like "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" followed by a dreadful disco phase) to respected Hollywood actress (the 1980's movies "Silkwood," "Moonstruck," "Mask" and "The Witches of Eastwick") back to joke (the 1990's and late-night infomercials in which she was a ubiquitious hawker of hair-care products).

Which is the real Cher? To the feminist critic Camille Paglia, Cher, like Raquel Welch and Loni Anderson, is the sort of star that the cultural elite loves to look down on, but who, at the same time, retains the affection of a grass-roots audience. "Because of her working-class background, a mass audience of women have a deep empathy with her emotional life," Ms. Paglia said. "If Cher's a joke, she made herself so by having too much surgery. Until she altered her nose she looked like an Indian princess. Then she started looking less and less like herself and started to drift, like Michael Jackson, into a solipsistic fantasy."

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Cher herself is the first to admit that she has often looked somewhat ridiculous. She puts the blame partly on the way the music business operated when she entered show business. "It was a time when girl singers were patted on the head for being good and told not to think," she remembered. "As a wife, mother and recording artist who was gigging constantly, I had to juggle so many balls at once that I didn't have time to think. It's not been a deep musical career, and I've always dressed kind of bizarre. But I think my voice has gotten better, and so has my choice of music."

"It's a Man's World" may be the first Cher album that doesn't demand a weird wardrobe to match its material. The songs suggest a woman of a certain age pausing to look back on her love life and vowing not to repeat old mistakes.

Cher's love life, of course, has been one of the most discussed in show business. From Sonny Bono, her husband, mentor and singing partner in the mid-60's, with whom she developed a kind of hippie Burns-and-Allen act, she drifted to Mr. Geffen, then married the rock guitarist Gregg Allman, who at the time was addicted to heroin.

Cher has a daughter, Chastity, now 27, by Mr. Bono, and a son, Elijah, 19, by Mr. Allman, and she is fiercely proud of both. Although she was initially taken aback when her daughter's came out as a lesbian eight years ago ("I felt guilty," she said. "Both their childhoods were not exactly Betty Crocker"), she now calls her daughter "one of the coolest people I've ever known."

After the marriage to Mr. Allman came relationships with a string of rock musicians including Gene Simmons of Kiss, David Paich of Toto and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi. Her last major relationship, with a young actor named Rob Camilletti, ended more than four years ago.

"Rob was my best relationship ever, and when we broke up I was devastated," she said. "But we're still best friends. Since Rob, I have had one relationship, and it was great, but it lasted for about a minute and a half."

IF CHER'S RELATIONSHIPS HAVE BEEN BRIEF ("two years used to be my cutoff point," she said), her career never seems to die. Mr. Palminteri, who worked with Cher for a year on "Faithful," attributes the longevity of her stardom to a mixture of self-discipline and street-smarts.

"When you become a star, and you're not hungry anymore, one of the things that keeps you a star is your work ethic," said Mr. Palminteri, who wrote the script for the movie in addition to starring in it. "Cher's very regimented. She gets up at a certain time, works out, has a chef that cooks certain things for her to stay in great shape, has a voice teacher come every few days for a singing lesson and a chiropractor who gives her adjustments. She's also one of the smartest people I've ever met," he added. "Mark my words, she will become an A-list director one day, guaranteed."

The first step in Cher's directing career is a 37-minute segment of a Home Box Office movie, "If These Walls Could Talk," a trilogy about abortion in America that will be shown in October. The episodes, which are set in the same house during different decades, feature Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Anne Heche. Cher directed the 90's episode and has a small role as an abortion doctor.

Can Cher regain her foothold in the Hollywood firmament? "I've had huge ups and downs in my life, and I've made some stupid, stupid mistakes and bad choices," she said. "But no matter what I'm going through at the moment, somehow I always think the future is going to be better, and somehow it always is."

A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 1996, on Page 2002024 of the National edition with the headline: POP/JAZZ;Queen of the Comeback, Cher Tries Yet Again. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe